


Five people who didn't always believe Spencer Reid, and one person who did

by Zeborah



Series: Five and One [2]
Category: Criminal Minds
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Hallucinations, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-26
Updated: 2015-09-26
Packaged: 2018-04-23 10:32:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4873462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zeborah/pseuds/Zeborah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Reid notices a spike in the quarterly crime reports, and a part of him knows what's behind it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five people who didn't always believe Spencer Reid, and one person who did

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sequel to [Five times Aaron Hotchner felt helpless, and one time he didn't](http://archiveofourown.org/works/279399) and will make so much more sense if you read that first, because I wrote that between seasons 4 and 5 and so it promptly became an alternate universe; this one is therefore even more of one.
> 
> Content notes at the end.

**1\. Jennifer Jareau**

Reid caught up with JJ on her way to Rossi's office. "Hey, have you had any cases from Virginia, DC or Maryland recently?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary," she said. "Why?"

"Last night I was reading the state-by-state quarterly crime rate reports—"

"Sounds fun," she put in teasingly.

"Actually it's fascinating, but what particularly struck me was that the murder rate for those three states has been generally decreasing since 1991, or 1993 in the case of Maryland, but this quarter it was slightly up in all three states, _but_ at the same time the rates for violent crime and property crime have been continuing their downward trends."

She shook her head. "What kind of increase are we talking about?"

"Well, the same quarter a year ago had two hundred and sixty-eight cases, but this quarter had two hundred and eighty-four."

She stopped outside Rossi's door. "But the rates must fluctuate naturally anyway, right?"

"Yes," he admitted. "But I thought, if you'd noticed anything unusual..."

"I'll keep an eye out, but there's nothing there at the moment." As if to cheer him up, she added confidentially, "I'll tell you what I did find." She showed him the cover of the folder she was bringing Rossi. "Hawaii."

"Ooh, I'll tell Morgan," he said, and won a grin from her. Then over her shoulder he saw Hotch in Rossi's office, watching him through the blinds.

Last time Hotch had visited the BAU he'd been using a wheelchair, thanks to Foyet. Reid had seen him walking with a cane a couple of times since, and once without. But three months ago, when he'd joined the US Attorney's Office, he'd started all but dodging their calls. They'd figured he needed the clean break to move on, and their jobs made it easy to let him. There was no reason for their paths to cross.

JJ went into the office with a casual, "Hey, Rossi," and Reid hurried back down to his desk to work out what reading he wanted to take on the plane.

 

**2\. Penelope Garcia**

The next quarter's murder rates were still up.

Reid went to Garcia for more data: dates and times; locations; status of the cases; victim age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and occupation; weapon, signature, trophies—

"You know some of that's only going to be in the full case files, right?"

"Can't you do some kind of data mining?"

"You'll get what's given to you, young man," she said sternly, but he could see she was already thinking about how to do it, and when the spreadsheet arrived in his email it had even more information than he'd hoped for.

There was no significant increase in the number of solved cases: he eliminated those and started with geographic profiling. Breaking the numbers down by county showed the increase was centered on Northern Virginia, DC, and Central Maryland.

Men, not women. Not juveniles.

Not guns.

He leaned forward: that was interesting. In DC the vast majority of homicides involved guns, the number of deaths by gunshot wound was following the normal downward trend — and the number of unsolved adult male homicides from other causes had almost doubled.

As he was poring over the rest of the data, he became aware of Garcia leaning over his shoulder. He twisted to look at her and she smirked. "Whatcha looking at?"

He showed her: the trends, the geographic profiling, the spike in the non-firearms-related homicides. 

She stared at the chart for a moment, then said, "But you've manufactured that."

"What do you mean?"

"You've got a set of naturally varying data with an overall upwards trend, you've systematically discounted all the subsets that are trending downwards, so of course it looks like there's a spike in what's left over."

"There is a spike."

"You know what I mean. Spikes happen. I could take the data from California and find the same—"

"California has seventeen fewer homicides than the same period last year."

"Then I could discount all the upwards trends and find a trough. It doesn't mean anything and saying it does is just bad science."

"No, it's bad science to say that something's bad science just because you don't like the conclusion."

"Guys, guys!" Morgan interrupted. "You want to take it outside or what?"

Reid flushed as he realised the whole bullpen was looking at them, and ran a hand through his hair. "Right. Sorry."

"Um," Garcia agreed. "I guess we'd better get to the conference room."

Reid blinked, then remembered the meeting Rossi had called. He dug in his intray for the files he was meant to have read, and turned back to his computer to close his spreadsheets and charts.

Warded back by a silent gesture of Hotch's hand. As he opened and quickly shut his mouth, Hotch finished scanning the screen, and met his eyes with a grim expression that said he saw the same thing Reid saw: maybe twenty murders in six months. Maybe forty.

"Reid?" Garcia called.

And it was two hundred and forty-two days since Hotch had had any business being here. Reid left his computer and caught up with Garcia. "Hey," he said apologetically, "after this is over, could you maybe get me some more files?"

 

**3\. Emily Prentiss**

JJ helped him share out the files among the team, six apiece.

"How come he doesn't get any?" Prentiss complained.

"I've already read them all," Reid said, nervousness turning the answer into a question. He licked his lips and said, "These are all murders from the last six months in north Virginia, DC, and Central Maryland and I think they might be linked."

She glanced around the table, tallying the stacks: hers, Rossi's, Morgan's, and Lim's. "Okay..." She flipped through her own cases: "Um, they're all men?"

"They're all blitz attacks," Rossi said.

Their new profiler Lim, who'd pulled out all the crimescene photos and arranged them haphazardly in front of himself, said, "He's not making any attempt to hide the bodies even where there's cover right there. And they're all on hard ground. Even in the park he's stayed on the path and waited for his victim to come to him."

"He's ambushing them."

"Maybe for some of these, but here he was near a light. His victim could have seen him there. Not his face, though."

"This one rang the doorbell," Prentiss confirmed.

Morgan shook his head. "There's two here he's dragged out of sight. And he's just using whatever weapons come to hand— Well, except for this stabbing."

"Glass bottle?" Rossi asked, showing that photo of Jeff Mason.

"Definitely a knife. But these aren't sophisticated attacks. He's just getting in, killing, and getting out. Why give the victim the chance to avoid him?"

"He doesn't want to leave footprints," Lim said. "—And he knows the victim won't see him as a threat."

"That's a whole lot of different neighbourhoods to blend into," Morgan pointed out.

"Has _anyone_ got any footprints?" Rossi asked. "Fingerprints, DNA — witnesses — anything?"

Prentiss, still on the doorbell case, said, "I've got a smudged footprint and the wife upstairs heard a car drive off. Oh, and there was an emptied wallet..." But when she found that file she grimaced: "He must have worn gloves."

As the rest of the team kept looking for a connection, Hotch appeared silently from behind Reid, a half dozen files open in his arms. Reid resisted the urge to try to see what they said and glanced at JJ instead. She gave him a sympathy smile in response.

Suddenly Prentiss said, "How did you select these cases?"

"What do you mean?" Reid asked, too quickly.

"Well, nothing we've said has been new to you. You know these files inside out: you know we've got stabbings and blunt objects and stranglings—"

"Broken neck," Lim put in.

"We've got cities and suburbs; alleys, parks, restrooms, the front porch of the victim's own house. Some of them take cash, most don't; some bring their own weapons, most don't; some hide the body, most don't. Time of day and day of week varies wildly. Victimology is all over the place: black, white, young, old, blue-collar, white-collar, unemployed, married, single. I'm just not seeing a connection."

"Hang on," Morgan said, "we've got a disorganised blitz-style attack combined with an organised suppression of any forensic evidence."

"Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything if those are the criteria Reid's used to select these cases."

Reid slipped his hands uncomfortably into his pockets. "There shouldn't be so many cases like this in this area over this time period."

"But there'd be some." She turned her pen to point at the wall behind him. "You've got no map and no photoboard: even you don't think they're linked."

JJ jumped in to rescue him: "We don't think they're all linked, but we think at least sixty to seventy percent of them are."

"Maybe eighty percent," Reid said, and kept his eyes off the stack of files in Hotch's hands. "And I think there are more cases I didn't select, and I think the unsub's going to keep on killing until we catch him."

Lim picked up his photos again; Prentiss looked away with a grimace.

Rossi started closing his files. "Prentiss is right: there's no link in these files or you'd have found it. We need to talk to the friends and families, find out who these people were. JJ, you go with Morgan, Lim with me."

"And I'll go with Don Quixote," Prentiss concluded without rancour.

JJ said quickly, "Remember that these cases haven't been linked officially and we haven't been invited by any of the jurisdictions, so we need to tread carefully. We should stress that we're just investigating a possible connection to some other cases."

Rossi added, "If anyone doesn't want to cooperate, let it go: we've got plenty to be getting on with." He passed a couple of files each to Reid and JJ by way of evening out the caseload. "Meet back here at four, or when I get my head handed to me on a plate, whichever comes first."

 

**4\. Derek Morgan**

"I still don't know about Samuel Parkstone," Prentiss said as they came back into the conference room. "His wife really didn't want us to catch whoever killed him, and someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure she couldn't be placed on that porch. He'd have got bloodspray all over him, and that's not like our unsub at all."

"You think it was someone she knows?" Rossi asked.

"It looks like it," Reid admitted.

Hotch shook his head, but he still wasn't explaining why, and Reid wasn't going to let him second-guess the people who were actually there.

Morgan brought donuts and, as they passed the box around, JJ strode in with Garcia hurrying behind. "Let's go over the victims one at a time," Rossi said.

"Well, Samuel Parkstone," Prentiss started, to get him out of the way, "thirty-seven, realtor, married and legally adopted his wife's ten-year-old girl from a previous relationship, nice house in the burbs."

"Very nice savings account," Garcia added from her piles of printouts. "I found a trust fund, a college degree in marketing, house and two cars all in his name, and a Massey Pre-Nup."

Rossi shook his head. "There's his mistake: you should never make it more profitable for your wife to murder you than to divorce you."

"It mightn't have been about the money," Reid said. "It was when we asked about his relationship with the daughter that she shut us out."

"Interesting. This guy Gordon Renn just got diagnosed with cancer, but apparently someone didn't want to wait for nature to take its course. Staff at his son's school say he was quite the charmer, but there was a divorce in progress?"

"Also a restraining order and domestic abuse charges," Garcia said, "except those weren't going anywhere because those things never do. Erik Pierce and William Lee Holden also had fat pocketbooks and restraining orders, in case anyone's counting."

"Robert Yarrow didn't have either," Morgan pointed out. "In fact he was so quiet at his low-level clerical job they literally forgot about him come promotion time. And Irvin Wilford was the complete opposite."

JJ nodded: "Kept getting in trouble at school — mouthing off to teachers, petty vandalism, setting fires in trashcans. He left before graduating and has been bouncing from job to job ever since. His latest job was at a garage but he got fired the day before he was murdered: apparently they don't like it when you light up so near the gas."

Hotch set Falsted's casefile on the table by Reid's elbow. But Reid had discounted that case for a reason: it had looked more personal, as if the murderer had been known to the victim, and it had involved a gun.

Besides, with all the names being thrown around the table he could see them swirling together into a cloud, lifting and sparking with the links forming between them: "James Glaser's younger step-brother had scars and permanent hearing damage from a— a game where James tied ten skyrockets to him on the Fourth of July eleven years ago. And Joaquín Cupo worked as a firefighter and volunteered for so many extra shifts his colleagues nicknamed him Pyro."

Lim said, "These all sound more like unsubs than victims."

"Guys, I think we're looking at a vigilante. Like Marvin Doyle — except instead of targeting people for crimes they've committed, he's targeting them for crimes he thinks they're going to commit."

"Like a one-man Precrime," Prentiss said, and Reid saw the pages of the old Philip K. Dick anthology turn before him. The analogy fit, but it harked back too to Cesare Lombroso's concept of _born criminals_ and the ancient debate of—

"So are we looking for someone in the criminal justice system?" JJ asked, while Hotch paced the edge of the room.

"It would give him access to a lot of these cases," Rossi agreed, with reservations.

Morgan voiced them: "But if they were all in the system before the murders Garcia would have spotted it."

"You bet your life, honeybunch."

"Most of these crimescenes look more opportunistic. Like he's patrolling target-rich environments, looking for other predators. Anyone could do that."

"Not just anyone," Prentiss said. "He knows how to cover his tracks, but he also knows when he doesn't have to. That's got to be some kind of law enforcement background. He's organised, efficient, driven — how often is he doing this?"

Reid rearranged the cases from a cloud to a line as he chewed on his lip. There were so many they stretched out the door. Some he'd included before didn't seem to fit now, and others he now thought he'd been wrong to discard (but not Falsted. Falsted would never have been a killer) but he could see the shape of the timeline. "It's not on a regular schedule—"

"Avoiding a pattern," Rossi put in with a nod.

"But I think on average once a week since Friday the twenty-sixth of March. Nothing in business hours," he added.

"A nine-to-five job is definitely not law enforcement," Prentiss said with a rueful laugh.

"It's a pity, actually," Reid said absently: "someone this good at identifying future unsubs could have been an extraordinarily accomplished profiler."

Silence fell, and his carefully constructed timeline shattered to the floor. It left him looking straight into the doorway where Hotch stood looking straight back at him, eyebrows mildly raised as if it were about time he said it.

His brain had been trying to tell him all along, if only he'd listened to it.

Everyone was staring at him: most of them in dismay; Morgan in disbelief; Garcia in confusion. "What?" she asked as they each revisited the profile again in light of... "What is it?"

Thoughtfully Lim said, "Maybe he _was_ law enforcement, but had to move to a deskjob after an injury. That would explain why he sticks to hard surfaces and lures the victims to him, and it would explain why he feels compelled—"

" _No_ ," Morgan interrupted, shoving his chair back as he stood.

Lim blinked at his vehemence. Then, belatedly, his eyes widened. He'd never met Hotch, but of course he'd heard the stories about what'd happened, why the vacancy had opened.

Reid said, "Morgan, it makes sense. The timing, the profile..." Ever since he'd seen the increase in the quarterly crime rates his subconscious had known it wasn't a coincidence.

"A profile's a profile, Reid. This?" The sweep of his arm encompassed all their files — all the murders. "This is not Hotch."

"But if you just think about it for—"

"No!"

Rossi tried, "Derek—"

"Do what you want, but I'm _not_ going to be a part of this."

Hotch stepped forward from the doorway: out of Morgan's way as he stormed out, and nearer the rest of the team as they sat there. His expression hardened, watching them.

Desperately Garcia said, "Will somebody please tell me what's going on?"

She knew, the same way Morgan knew, the same way Reid had known all along. But out of all of them it took JJ to say in a low voice, "He told me, once, he joined the BAU because at the prosecutor's office, by the time the cases reached him it felt too late. He wanted to stop them from happening in the first place. So this..." She started to reach for a file, and shrank back from it again. "Is him stopping the murders before they happen."

"Oh my God," Garcia said, and swallowed. "Are you sure? Couldn't it be—" None of their faces left room to hope, and she cast a wistful look out the door after Morgan. "What do we do?"

"Same thing we always do, Pinkie," Prentiss said blackly.

"Don't joke. Please don't joke about this."

"It's not a joke," Reid said. Hotch had folded his arms in his most uncompromising attitude, and lifted his chin now as he surveyed their reactions: Rossi's set jaw, JJ's shaken nod, and Lim's relief at not having to choose between his team and the right thing. "We catch him."

 

**5\. David Rossi**

Garcia looked up what records she could find without a warrant. No-one was very surprised that no evidence of murder sprang out from them.

Lim and two other agents with cars Hotch wouldn't recognise handed off a tail on him two nights in a row. One evening he went out to a bar and ate a cheap steak while splitting his attention between the cheap television and some paperwork; the next he spent an hour at the gym before spending the rest of the night in his apartment.

On the third night the BAU were on a plane to Indiana. By the time they returned, another man had been murdered. He'd been at the same bar on the same night as Hotch, but what did that prove? The police were convinced it was gang-related, and there was nothing to indicate they were wrong.

Another attempt at tailing him ended early when he went out for a bike ride. "There's no way a car can go that slow without being noticed," Lim reported over the phone.

Rossi, back in the BAU with Reid, JJ and Prentiss, said, "I swear to God, if he's cycling to the murder scenes..."

"It'd explain how he got in and out so quietly for some of them," JJ said — "but isn't it too soon since the last one?"

Probably. Maybe. They were used to knowing that someone might be killing even as they spoke, but knowing it about _Hotch_ — Reid blurted, "We could search his apartment while he's out."

"He's not going to keep evidence in his apartment," Rossi said.

Pursing his lips, he argued, "He might."

"He works in the US Attorney's Office: no-one's giving us a warrant based on a profile. We try, he hears about it and all we get is he starts being more careful."

Prentiss cleared her throat and said diffidently, "I've still got a key. And the code to the alarm."

Rossi gave her an incredulous look.

She glanced down at the tabletop, but shrugged. "If we knew we were going to find something there, we'd be safe to get a warrant."

There was a long silence, where no-one looked at anyone else. Finally Rossi said, "We're not talking about this. Tonight's a washout. Let's all go home, get some rest, come back with fresh eyes tomorrow."

*

There were no better ideas the next day, only a fresh stack of consults needed on other cases. Late in the morning, JJ called Morgan out to get his opinion on something; a minute later Prentiss asked Reid casually, "So, you want to go get some lunch?"

He darted his eyes up at Rossi's office, but he was off in a meeting with Strauss. Lim was pretending not to notice anything. "Yeah, okay."

They made it as far as the elevator before Morgan caught the door and slipped in with them. "Come on," he said when Prentiss banged the back of her head against the elevator wall. "You've been acting weird all morning and suddenly JJ's trying to distract me?"

"We're going to talk about the case," Reid told him.

"You don't need to sneak out of Quantico in the middle of the day to talk about the case." He waited them out; they waited him out right back. "Look, I do _not_ want to dig into Hotch's life. But I don't want to find out what happens to your careers if he comes home with food poisoning and finds you breaking into his apartment without a warrant, either. You know you need a lookout."

*

Prentiss knocked; waited. "Hotch?"

Silence still. She glanced at Reid — he looked in turn down the empty corridor — and pulled on a pair of gloves. The key turned in the lock, and she moved confidently to the alarm as Reid took a hesitant step in after her.

Hotch turned to them from a window, and Reid recoiled from the furious glower on his face. But Prentiss finished unsetting the alarm, and he forced himself to pull on his own gloves and close the door behind them.

"The bourbon's gone," he noticed first. Hotch had stopped drinking, after the attack, or at least he'd never let Reid catch him at it. But he'd kept the bottle there, a symbol of control.

"Maybe he doesn't want Jack seeing it?" Prentiss suggested. But that was the other thing missing: toys, and all other sign of a frequently visiting son. A bedroom was made up for him, with bookshelves, a bucket of lego, a windowsill filled with toy cars. But it was unnaturally _tidy_ , and in the bathroom the laundry hamper was as empty of children's clothes as it was of bloodstains.

The bathroom cabinet was filled with prescriptions. Reid quickly checked the labels, returning each to its original place and orientation. "I recognise most of these from the medications Foyet was on," he said: he memorised the others to look up later, but the dates checked out.

"This _sucks_ ," Prentiss said feelingly, checking under the sink. A large bottle of bleach was half-empty, but that didn't prove anything either.

Having started opening doors, they turned to Hotch's bedroom and closet. A whole row of suits in drycleaning bags. Expensive dress shoes, and two pairs of identical cheap sneakers that barely smelled of exercise let alone bleach. "Ten dollars at Walmart," Prentiss said. "Get them bloody, bleach them, give them to Goodwill, get a new pair, come home and go to bed."

Hotch stood by said bed, in front of the dresser. He stood unmoving as Reid approached. Reid bit his lip, reminded himself that Prentiss was there, and reached _through_ Hotch's thigh to pull open the drawer. For a moment cognitive dissonance jangled, two realities colliding: a hand and a leg in the same place at the same time and all the implications that held for temporal mechanics, relativity, P = NP, majority and minority reports coequal and coexisting without contradiction or paradox, and wouldn't that mean—?

"Reid? What is it?"

And with a thudding relief he was looking at a coin album and Hotch had found somewhere else to glare at him from.

"It's just a coin album," he said. He lifted it out, stilling the tremor in his hand. He knew Hotch had collected coins as a boy, but this looked new. Ten pages, nine coins each, all perfectly ordinary American smallchange. His brain, revved up from its existential crisis, now worked overtime trying to find a pattern in the denominations, or years, or obverse and reverse, or degrees rotated, or grease deposited from hundreds of hands — but no equations fit. "Why would he collect these?"

"Maybe it's Jack's," she suggested.

It didn't feel right. Nothing felt right. He should be able to _see_ —

He put it back, and they kept looking until Morgan called to remind them it was well past one o'clock.

*

When they got back to the BAU, Rossi was perched on Reid's desk, paging through his files. "How was lunch?" he asked without looking up.

They looked at each other, and away again.

He put the files down and stood up. "Look, I hate it too. But this isn't just any unsub. He knows exactly how this goes, and he _will_ use that against us if he gets wind we're onto him. So we're just going to have to wait until he makes a mistake."

"He doesn't make mistakes," Morgan pointed out.

Which wasn't entirely... And Reid could see Hotch hovering tensely, waiting for him to follow the trail to that thought. But what was it? What... "What if he's already made a mistake?" he said, grabbing again for the case files. "The other day Prentiss referred to 'Minority Report', but the whole point of the story was that the precogs' visions of the future _weren't_ inevitable, because multiple simultaneous time paths left room for free will. So what if—"

"Reid. Reid. _Spencer_." Rossi's hand stopped him flipping another page. "Stop it. You can't keep doing this. We'll come back to it when we get some evidence. Until then, we wait."

 

**6\. Aaron Hotchner**

Reid sat in the waiting room, flicking through magazines and pausing at the crosswords, until Hotch arrived and his assistant looked up to greet him. Reid stood and said awkwardly, "Hi, Hotch."

"Reid," he said, sounding pleased but curious. It had been nearly nine months, Reid realised, since he'd heard Hotch's voice. "How can I help you? Is everything okay?"

"It's, uh, about a case."

"Come on in. How's everyone doing?"

"Um, good," Reid said, following him in. He closed the door while Hotch set down his briefcase and eased into his chair. "Everyone's good."

"Have a seat. Tell me about this case."

He couldn't do this: this was Hotch. And, he reminded himself, grasping his satchel handle, this was thirty-three names he knew with a 95% probability. He straightened and said, "You're making mistakes."

Hotch leaned back. After a moment he opened a hand invitingly. "Okay. Which case?"

Reid opened his satchel and gave him the Falsted crimescene photos.

He didn't blink. No-one would have expected him to: he'd dealt with similar photos for years in the FBI and now for months more in the prosecutor's office. He only said, "This doesn't look like any of my cases."

"Gerald Falsted was twenty-four. When he was a boy he used to peek into neighbourhood girls' windows, then he started stealing their underwear. Last year he was arrested for assault on a woman, but two months ago he was released on parole."

"And subsequently shot," Hotch said, looking at each photo in turn. "Once, in the face, close-range. What'd you get from the gun?"

"It was the victim's. No other prints."

"Well, you know this is all pointing to someone he knew."

Reid pursed his lips and shook his head. His heart hammered as he watched Hotch's face without losing sight of his hands. "If the unsub knew him, he would have known this wasn't Gerald Falsted."

Hotch's eyes flicked down to the photos and up again, betraying only puzzlement. "Then who was it?"

"His older brother Ian, coming to visit him. They'd look a lot alike, in the dark, to someone in a hurry. And someone who's trying to identify, stalk and murder a future serial killer every week would always be in a hurry. Sooner or later, it'd be inevitable he'd start making mistakes."

Slowly, so slowly it would have taken a camera and motion replay to catch just where it began, Hotch's expression hardened. "I see," he said stonily. He squared up the photos and handed them back. "I don't know anything about this case. If you're looking for someone like... who you think I am, you should look somewhere else."

"Oh, we— we've done looking."

Hotch held his gaze effortlessly. It was Reid who ended up blinking, and when he did Hotch asked, "How long have you been hallucinating?"

His stomach lurched. "What?"

"You saw me coming, but you didn't look at me until Janette did. You weren't sure I was real, and you're used to using other people's reactions to work out what to believe. It's been going on for a long time, but recently it's been getting worse. You know you won't be able to hide it from the team forever, and sooner or later you'll have to leave the BAU. —Or else you'll be the one making a mistake and getting someone killed."

The terror stuck in his throat, burrowing hooks through his chest from the inside out. If he ever— if they knew— if Hotch— With a painful effort he gulped it down and asked, "Is that what you're going to tell them?"

"Reid," Hotch said patiently. "I'm telling _you_ : don't be so determined to wrap up this one last case that you waste your time on the wrong man." He paused to assess the effect of that friendly advice. "Are you arresting me?"

He bit his lip unhappily. "No, sir."

"Then I'm afraid I have to get back to my own cases. When you've caught your unsub, give me a call and we can talk about life after the BAU."

Numb-fingered, he fumbled the files back into his satchel. He didn't expect Hotch to stand with him, and he didn't think Hotch expected him to shake his hand. Clutching his satchel he turned straight to the door — but he still had one thing to say, even though when he looked back Hotch's expression hadn't changed in the slightest.

"Give me a list of names," Reid said to him, "and I'll tell you how many other mistakes you've made."

*

Rossi was waiting in his doorway when he got in to the BAU, and the rest of the team were making a show of being engrossed in case files. He put his head down and went on up to the office.

"Close the door," Rossi said, sitting down at his desk.

Reid obeyed. "I went to see Hotch."

"I figured."

He wanted to justify himself, but he couldn't very well explain that he'd been sure Hotch wanted to be caught because why else would his hallucination have been helping him all along? Instead he said weakly, "We didn't have anything else."

"So, what'd he say?"

"That I was wasting my time and should look somewhere else. ...And other things."

Rossi looked at him sharply: his discomfort wasn't hard to profile. "He got to you?"

He nodded, swallowed. "But I think I got to him too."

*

A case took them to Albuquerque for four nights. Hotch didn't haunt Reid there: it would have been a relief except that other things flickered at the edge of his vision, other patterns tantalisingly close to resolution, and he couldn't tell, rubbing at his eyes as he stared at the county map, if this would be the vision that would make their case spring into focus, or the vision that would start him down the Stygian path he'd feared his entire adult life.

Not yet, he told them. _Not yet._

*

The day after they got back, Rossi came striding down to the bullpen. "Reid, have you got your files?"

"Um," he said distractedly, "what files?"

"In three minutes you and I have a meeting with two Bureau lawyers, two representatives from the US Attorney's Office, and Stirling Littelwood of Littelwood and Associates. So, have you got your files?"

He was gaping. So were Prentiss and Morgan. "I— But—" Three minutes. "Right, I'll just—" There were boxes of files, but only one folder that mattered: he dug it from his desk drawer and hauled his satchel over his shoulder. "Where are we—?"

"Downstairs. Come on, kid."

The lift was both too slow and too fast. They were met at the bottom by the Bureau lawyers, who took them to the conference room where the others waited. They'd worked with Nina Sutherland before, and been cross-examined by Littelwood....

And between them sat Hotch. "Good morning, Dave. Reid," he added with an ambiguous nod.

Reid jerked a nod back, and Rossi said curtly, "What's this about, Aaron?"

"If you gentlemen would sit down," Littelwood said, and waited for them to go through the motions. "I'm given to understand the Behavioural Analysis Unit is investigating a case involving the murder of Ian Falsted, among others."

"Many others," Rossi corrected.

"I have a client who has some information that would allow you to close the case. My client is willing to share that information with you, under certain conditions."

Rossi steepled his fingers deliberately on the table and leaned over them, face to face with Hotch. "No. Conditions."

"I think you should see the conditions first, Dave."

"I think you should go to hell."

Nina's brow was furrowing at his antagonism, but Hotch only said, "You don't think it will help your case to know what this person wants?"

"Not if _this person_ is manipulating us."

"Excuse me," Nina put in, standing up: "Aaron, can we have a word?"

"I'm sorry, no. It's your choice, Dave. You can run the risk that the conditions are intended to manipulate you and that you'll be powerless against them—"

Rossi stood abruptly.

"Or you can walk away, right now," Hotch agreed, looking unphased by what he was implicitly admitting to them both. Nina was still half a step away from the table, rearranging her understanding of what was going on here. It didn't matter to him, when the BAU still had no evidence. If they refused to listen to him, they'd be letting him walk out the door as if he'd never walked in through it. "And never close your case."

Rossi bristled at the ultimatum. Reid licked his lips and asked, "What are the conditions?"

Littelwood, an eye on Rossi and Nina as they sat slowly back in their chairs, passed out printed copies. "To summarise: my client will provide all pertinent information necessary to close your case. My client will not answer any questions not necessary to establish the facts of the matter in question. If any charges consistent with the information provided are subsequently brought against my client, my client will plead guilty to them."

Reid had finished the whole document by this point, and was now counting letters in an effort not to let anyone see him tremble. He was fairly sure Hotch had already noticed, but Hotch was projecting a casual calm about everything.

Littelwood persisted in his summary: "Likewise my client will not contest the sentencing recommendation of the US Attorney's Office. The US Attorney's Office will recommend the maximum appropriate sentence without parole in protective custody in a maximum security federal facility. The FBI and the US Attorney's Office will make every effort to keep the matter from the media."

Rossi snorted. Neither institution would want the media spotlight this would cause, any more than Hotch wanted it affecting Haley or Jack.

"And," Littelwood finished, "Doctor Spencer Reid will resign permanently from the FBI."

Reid lifted his eyes to Hotch's even gaze as Rossi exploded: "What the _hell_ do you think you're playing at, Aaron?"

"It's okay," Reid said without looking away from Hotch. It was probably the only clause that was really non-negotiable. And... and he was right. It was time.

Rossi stared at him. "Like hell it's okay! We'll get him another way."

"It's a good deal. It's— It's a good deal for both of us. Rossi, just— I'll explain later."

Rossi's eyes narrowed. Reid could see him thinking _drugs_ , and his gaze slipped down to the table, because it might so easily have been, and because he ought to correct him but for now it was so much easier to let him believe the lie of imprecision.

The Bureau lawyers read the conditions in detail, but it was a good deal. Rossi signed with gritted teeth; Reid signed.

Nina clearly hadn't come here expecting to be the one signing for the US Attorney's Office, but when Hotch passed it to her she only muttered, "Son of a bitch," and signed.

Through all of this Hotch sat calmly, as if whether they signed or not made no difference to him. And now that Nina shoved it back to him and they watched to see whether he'd pick up the pen or change his mind—

Reid blinked as the two states superimposed, opposite but identical, wave and particle, inevitable _but non-determined_ and that was the paradox. He'd stop killing either way: either because he'd be in prison or because he'd fear another mistake. His career would be over either way. So would Reid's, yet at the same time it wouldn't, because he could take this insight — all these futures sitting on top of each other, unknowable-but-known, the perfect union of causality and free will; and the philosophy and the mathematics of it danced together in their intertwined helices along the fringe of his vision—

Hotch picked up the pen and signed.

As he set the pen back down he said, "You'll find a coin album in my apartment. Obviously I never kept any trophies or anything else that might link me to the murders. But there's a code."

"You wanted to make sure you didn't leave any patterns," Rossi accused.

"I won't answer any questions about my motives," Hotch reminded him, and looked back at Reid. "Ignore the second and third pages of every three. The last digit of the year is location; the denomination is—"

"Means," Reid finished. It was already unravelling in his head, the coins sorting themselves into a timeline wending its way around a map of the greater DC area; another copy of them forming into stacks of casefiles. He opened the folder he'd brought with him and reached for the pen.

Rossi grabbed his arm back. He blinked, then remembered: he wasn't meant to have been there, or to have seen it.

The Hotch who'd been there was not the Hotch who was here now — but the Hotch here looked at him just the same: a grim understanding that wouldn't have it any other way. "Let me see that," he said. And with Reid's list in front of him, he crossed out two of the names with neat blue lines. Wrote in two — three more. Added a line at the top, his signature at the bottom. Finally he passed the pen to Littelwood as if for safekeeping, passed the page back to Reid, and said, "So tell me."

And with that, all the multiple futures were distilled into one ineluctable present. The answer, and then Hotch handcuffed and led away to prison— Reid couldn't stay to see that. He stuffed the confession into his satchel as he stood. "You already know," he said, and made for the door.

"You promised to tell me how many mistakes I made," Hotch said. Reid turned and met his gaze again: no anger or apology, no triumph or despair, only a calm unflinching determination to hear it. "So tell me, Reid."

"All of them," he said. "Thirty-four. They were all mistakes." There was no catharsis in saying it, and none reflected in Hotch's eyes. "You already knew that," he repeated, and went upstairs to write his resignation letter.

**Author's Note:**

> Content note for schizophrenia as written by someone who is to her best knowledge neuro-typical, so I can but try. Also canon-typical discussion of murders.


End file.
